This sounds so much like the Reddit drama. I doubt that this pushback matters. They expected the negative feedback, for sure, did the math, and decided that it's still worth it.
u/spez was right, I guess. "The protest over the API changes will pass".
They didn't pass for me. I do not use reddit on mobile whatsoever anymore (was daily, active user). Unfortunately Reddit still seems to be the best place (aside from lurking hundreds of telegram channels) to get up to date info on Ukraine.
I went from probably 150-200Hrs/Mo. To about 5.
I know I cannot be the only one. Reddit will live on; but technically so did MySpace.
Although tbf it’s probably accelerated the shift in Reddits demographic from users that post longform content to more casual users that just browse and upvote/downvote stuff without engaging beyond that. I doubt they care much bc they probably just want ad impressions and to become a titan akin to Facebook/twitter/etc. it seems short sighted but growth at the expense of community seems to be a common theme of vc backed anything
My reddit usage is now about 5% of what it was before. I also use it for Ukraine info, but now I do it at home on old.reddit.com, and not doomscrolling on mobile throughout the day.
I think that the bulk of the complaints is that Unity has become unusable for small developers due to the pricing model changes. It's not unusable in the sense of a personal pet peeve, but in the sense of not being commercially viable versus existing options, which include Godot, GameMaker, Love, etc.
Maybe Unity no longer cares about small indie developers so they priced them out of the engine, but only time will be able to tell whether they made a major business miscalculation. It's possible that larger developers are the bulk of Unity's income and they will be totally fine with the changes.
Still, I don't see a world where what Unity did was a good business move due to the trust issues mentioned by so many other people. I think that a model more similar to Unreal's would have been much better received.
I don't know, I think the unpredictability of how much you will owe Unity each month will be a big sticking point for all developers, big and small. A percentage of revenue is easy to account for; if we make this much money we will pay this much to Unity. A bill based on the vague "number of installs" calculated by a black box at Unity themselves is a financial disaster waiting to happen.
I do think the current reactions are a bit out of proportion, although that might be to pressure Unity into reversing their changes.
Unlike for Reddit users though, these pricing changes impact revenue calculations of developers and there are viable alternatives. Additionally from what I gleaned a lot if developers are not particularly happy with the state of the Unity tools, and sudden pricing changes surely don't inspire much confidence either.
So, I don't think no games will release in two years or so made in Unity, but this might have kicked off or accelerate an erosion of Unity's developer base. At least those developers that give Unity the prestige of being the engine of choice for Indie and AA games.
Maybe all of this is, purely from a revenue point of view, still worth it for them though.
Seems like an unattractive pricing model for developers.
Why would you tie your pricing to something like installs, which is completely unrelated to the profits the game is making.
This just means that developers will still have to pay install fees for their old games, as people re-install them on different machines, while not making a lot of profits in sales from that game anymore. Developers might be incentivized to remove older games from libraries like steam.
You just have to pay the runtime fee, in the following conditions:
"Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee:
Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs.
Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: Those that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs."
Comparing with Unreal that take 5% from your profit, if your game makes more than 1,000,000 USD, Unity still cheaper
Am I missing something in Unity's new pricing model? They want a cut, ranging anywhere from 0.02 to 0.2 USD per install of the game, if you sell more than somwthing like 100k or 1 million copies. Sounds reasonable? Who feels they've been shafted by this? Raise your game price by that much and you're good, no?
The problem is not that they wanted a cut. The problem is that they want to retroactively apply to all games that have ever been published and even those that aren’t using the most recent engine.
Also, there are cases where a developer might squeeze $100k out of sales and then get a game pass deal where they get another $100k that would result in them getting 5 million downloads. That would result in the fee being $1 million because they’re on the lower tier subscription.
They are doing this for two reasons from what I can tell:
a) they want a cut of game pass volume
b) they want to worse high volume micro transaction games onto their own ad network (if you sign up to their ad network you don’t pay the fee)
The biggest problem is them attempting to bill people who have already released games and might still get the odd download. It’s crazy cause these developers never agreed to the new license AND it’s highly doubtful this would be legal anyway because contracts need consideration. “We just want more money” probably won’t cut the mustard.
That's not 100% true. Fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. That's because otherwise is really hard to pin a TOS version. I'm not lawyer, but for all services that we use, i.e paypal, we receive monthly emails about TOS changes, and you have to accept them, to keep using their services...
Unlike PayPal though, you can't just close your account and hop to stripe instead. Once you develop a game you're stuck with that engine until you redevelop the game. Moving engines is not easy simple or fast.
It's like if I owned an old version of Photoshop and Adobe contacted me to say that because the jpg I produced blew up on Twitter I owe them $1000. I can't retroactively take the picture down and recreate it in gimp and I shouldn't have to. Most alternative products to unity simply do a hand wave to old products. "If your game was made in engine 2.0 you have this pricing structure, but engine 3.0 users have a different one"
> It's like if I owned an old version of Photoshop and Adobe contacted me to say that because the jpg I produced blew up on Twitter I owe them $1000.
Bad analogy. If you remove your game from any store, and you are not making more than 200k (free license) or 1M (for pro/enterprise license) last year, then you are fine. Nothing will be charged from you. If you released the game, did't update it, no bug fixes, nothing, but still profiting from it, and people still downloading it, then you will pay the 0.20 cents per install... It is just like that. People are jumping in a drama, that affect only huge mobile games, which are full with ads, addictive, that through Gamification try to earn screen time from the users.. Unity is greedy, but mostly the devs being affected by that, aren't those writing indie games.
It's like if I took an old version of photoshop and sold the pictures on patreon, but my patreon blew up and adobe decided they wanted a piece of the pie and changed their TOS, and made me take the jpg I made when I was under a DIFFERENT TOS down,remake the jpg in GIMP, or pay them for the privilege of keeping that picture up on the internet, and also any time that picture appears on imageboard I could also maybe be charged for it, but they totally have a way to tell if it was gotten from the imageboard or patreon trust them but they won't tell us how.
Unity has trapped game developers and held them hostage. Those devs made the game under one set of rules and pricing model, and now that the game is out they have a choice of destroying their product by removing it from availability, or pay money they had no way of predicting they would need? Just because you don't like the game devs doesn't mean Unity didn't fuck them over, and it sets a dangerous precedent.
Because you aren't paying unity for each copy you sell, you're paying for each time a user installs the game, which will basically always be much higher than the number of copies sold. I regularly install my games on 3-4 different machines. My activity would cost the developer 3—4 times as much in unity licensing.
Unity has clearly stated that they will charge for reinstalling, installing on multiple machines, and implied that pirated copies also count.
If you get unlucky and your game is popular with pirates, you're suddenly paying for a ton of licenses on copies of the game you never even sold.
You can quite literally script a process to repeatedly reinstall a single copy of the game to rack up unity charges for a developer you don't like.
People online have talked about things like "install bombing", where you install and reinstall a game repeatedly, which causes the 0.02-0.20 price to stack. But tbh I haven't read the new model and ToS fully, so this might be BS.
Also, retroactively applying the new model to already exiting games was also a bit of a bad move. You make a game and decide the business model based on what you know at the time and what you can predict will happen in the future, predicting that unity would change their pricing model like this is near impossible, so the business model you picked for your old games is now unfit.
Installs by Unity's own admission, only count each new machine, which I guess can be faked by malicious entities who want to hurt certain developers. This also counts pirate installs, but Unity claims to have a way to discern what is and isn't a pirate install.
Honestly, this is mostly going to hurt indie devs who make it, but aren't quite in the same successes bracket as a game like Cities: Skylines, Hearthstone, Rimworld. And also F2P games, especially mobile ones, where Whales can easily spend $200k or $1mil, but you have millions of installs of people just trying the free game and deleting it, or installing it on multiple devices.
The Runtime fee can easily exceed Unreal Engine's own 5% flat Royalty Fee by a fair margin (easily 10%) depending on the money you ask for and method of distribution, for example, you won't want to give out copies or discount the game as much after meeting the requirements.
The rule for the fee, for Unity Pro is: "Those that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs." Just the number of install plays 0 role, if the game didnt generate more than 1 million year, last year.
Take a game like vampire survivors - not a unity game, but one that I have installed 10+ times at this point. They have put the price up slightly since launch - I paid €2.39 for it.
The most objectionable thing about Unity's new pricing is it hits hardest the smaller indies with the lowest budgets. The AAA studios will barely notice it and are probably negotiating better terms anyway.
Not really. Look the pricing and the AND condition:
"Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee:
Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs.
Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: Those that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs."
So if you sold in the last year more than 200k AND have more than 200k game installs and have the unity personal version, then you have to pay for install...
Sure, if you are under the threshold you pay nothing. But once you are successful enough to have to pay, my point still stands. You are paying a much larger % of revenue the smaller you are and the cheaper your game is.
Not really.. affected by the new pricing are the "free for play" games, which are full with ads, own currency.. addictive mobile games.. and no, they won't move to Godot because they need the ads, in-game market, etc offered by Unity.
Maybe we're reading different announcements, but I can't find the part where a low-cast one-time-purchase game like Vampire Survivors wouldn't have to pay a 20c fee for every device I install the game on if it were made with Unity personal.
from their announcement was "Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs." but looks like they are backpaddling after some "leaked document" saying that they would use similar rule as Unreal, but ask for 4% instead of 5% as Unreal does.. Unreal is the only real solution against Unity.
The asinine part is per install, instead of something like revenue share. Regardless of the bar they set (200k x2) for additional installs to charge is terrible simply due to the install metric.
From what I can tell, if you were to sell a $5 game made with Unity and made $200,000 per year, the total charge would be $8,000. But that charge would be $40k if your game was only $1 and $800 if your game sold for $50. For Unity Pro if you made $10 million selling 1 million copies you would be charged $60,000. That same studio making $10 million on a game written with Unreal Engine would be charged $500,000 in royalties. That is far more than $60k for Unity. It still appears that Unity is the budget option, it just isn't quite as cheap as it used to be... So I couldn't find a situation where is cheaper to go with unreal (5% revenue share) than with Unity...
You are counting revenue share for unity, not per install. Say in the first instance, each user installed the game twice, your new charge is 16k$. That’s why people were reasonably upset. It’s the install metric. Glad they walked it back but just shows how disconnected the whole announcement was.
It's not neceesarily features, but overall it's much much easier to use and dive into co side ring what it is capable of.
The asset store with its integration is another huge selling point. For example, if you're like me, you're more of a coder than an artist. With the u it's asset store you could spend 0.00 - 100 dollars and buy some amazing assets to help jump start your hobby project.
As indie game developer myself, again: It only affect people developing mobile games, which mostly are full of ads and are super addictive. I see people trying now to get attraction to godot and etc, but the fact is that mostly "game studios" affected by the new pricing model, are studios releasing mediocre mobile apps, full of ads, addictive, which are just money grab. I for sure dont support Unity, I don't like their new strategies, the ironsource thing, but looking who is affected by that, basically are companies developing "games" that IMO shouldn't even exist.
"it mostly affects people I don't like" doesn't make it good (or legal) policy.
Take for example genshin impact: it's made in unity, has a high production value, is f2p with a in-game currency that can be purchased, and meets the threshold for the change requirements. The same company has several other similarly modeled games released across multiple platforms (PC and PlayStation).
Without any sort of heads up this company now will face massive charges because of high install volume, especially if the average user installs on multiple devices, but low individual income.
Should Hoyoverse have to remake all of their games in a new engine or deal with this new price structure with no way to plan for how much the new structure will cost them?
The game is also often review bombed by rival games. What would stop a rival company from setting up a bot that just mass installs on VMs to try and charge up their bill?
If that company sticks with the pricing structure there is a high chance production value will go down simply because costs have skyrocketed.
Unity has basically entrapped developers. Whether the devs are worth saving doesn't come into play - whether you can trap someone into using your product then retroactively charge them for their success is the question, and I think most game devs would say "no".
"Take for example genshin impact: it's made in unity, has a high production value, is f2p with a in-game currency that can be purchased, and meets the threshold for the change requirements. The same company has several other similarly modeled games released across multiple platforms (PC and PlayStation)."
From what I can tell, if you were to sell a $5 game made with Unity and made $200,000 per year, the total charge would be $8,000. But that charge would be $40k if your game was only $1 and $800 if your game sold for $50. For Unity Pro if you made $10 million selling 1 million copies you would be charged $60,000. That same studio making $10 million on a game written with Unreal Engine would be charged $500,000 in royalties. That is far more than $60k for Unity. It still appears that Unity is the budget option, it just isn't quite as cheap as it used to be.
Considering Unity has a negative operating margin of around 50%, it seems clear they need to start making more money. Customer acquisition and R&D costs have been growing much faster than revenue so they need to start making more money somewhere. R&D costs have risen by 275% over the past 3 years, and sales/marketing costs have increased 175%. Revenue has only increased 150% over the same period.
The problem isn't that Unity is changing their pricing model, it's that without warning they have changed their terms to a highly volatile pricing model that is holding game developers hostage.
Also that they hired thousands of people based on the assumption that they’d be selling tons of ads. That 50% unprofitability was a choice made by their management.
> The game is also often review bombed by rival games. What would stop a rival company from setting up a bot that just mass installs on VMs to try and charge up their bill?
This is FUD, but its covered by Unity FAQ. Either way, I would like to see "rivals", aka game studios, developing such amazing technology.. it would show even more that such "indie studios", developing high addictive, full of ads and "in game currency" are just bad for the whole game ecosystem and society.
there is no amazing technology to develop. I a random guy on the internet, could set up a bot with existing technology right now to just keep making VMs and installing the game. It would take an evening. Hell it doesn't even have to be a rival game company, it could literally be someone on 4chan who thought it would be funny.
Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee:
Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs.
Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: Those that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs.^
So, if you have the Pro or Enterprise that most studios have, they should have more than 1 million Revenue in the last year AND have more than 1 million game installs.
u/spez was right, I guess. "The protest over the API changes will pass".